Code Generation 2011

Last year I enjoyed visiting the Code Generation conference. I presented my lessons learned in building a Model Driven Software Factory, met a lot of interesting people, and had a lot of fun. It’s really interesting to share experiences with people (experts!) in the field of Model Driven Software Development. Have a look at my write-up of a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session about Code Generation vs. Model Interpretation to get an impression.

This year I will again host a session at the Code Generation conference, a Goldfish Bowl about Making Model-Driven Software Development live up to its promises:

Model Driven Development proponents see a lot of advantages of using MDD techniques. Higher development speed, increased quality, more cost-effective, empowering less-experienced developers, just to name a few. If you look at these promises the question arises why the whole world isn’t using MDD right now? Why don’t we hear a lot of MDD success stories?

Do developers see MDD as a threat? Or do they see it as yak-shaving? And what about the business? They must love the promises of MDD right? Or don’t they believe another silver bullet story?

The aim of this session is to research and discuss the problem of MDD adoption. What technical challenges in the realm of MDD have to be tackled to increase adoption among developers? There are quite some success stories nowadays about cloud platforms which are heavily based on metadata-driven approaches. Are we, the MDD community, missing this movement? Or is the problem of our community that we’re just having fun within the borders of our own technical playground?

The advantages of a fishbowl setup are that we can properly discuss this subject with a large group of people and that every participant has the same authority (no difference between speakers and audience). I hope we can create valuable output and stirr an online discussion afterwards (as we successfully did last year with a discussion on code generation vs. model interpretation).

Maybe we can even start sharing ideas on beforehand! Please share your ideas about how to make MDSD live up to its promises in the comments. In addition, let me know if you have plans to join Code Generation 2011, it would be nice to meet in real life!